In this episode we get the chance to talk to Ryan Chan. He is the CEO & Founder at Upkeep Maintenance Management, a company that developed a really amazing Maintenance Application suite that works perfectly for the NGV Industry.

Ryan started as a process engineer at a manufacturing facility, but he quickly realized that optimizing uptime and minimize breakdowns and got into the maintenance rabbit-hole. As a result of this he got into the place that many of us faced for many years, where the existing CMMS presented this great desktop-based solutions where the work orders were filled in paper out in the field and then those had to be transcribed and re-entered into these CMMS; instead of making their days easier, they were getting more difficult.

He taught himself to code and started this great journey of developing a unique CMMS that enables mobility as a main feature; mobile-first as they call it. The driver for Ryan is to do unique things and create something that’s never been done before, as well as providing value to the customers and impacting customers lives with the correct support.

The best way to understand Upkeep is to test it. See by yourself how Upkeep can help your CNG / LNG Business, start by giving it a try.

Watch the videos and read the full notes at ricardocarmona.io 

When a CMMS gets deployed in big teams, is really interesting how you get groups to buy in the idea and then once they try it, great things start to happen.

But particularly in our industry, safety is key because many teams our staff is sujected to potentially life threatening situations. The basic focus here, is to plan against any kind of situation. The application helps you in this sense also by getting a better audit trail of who’s done what and why. A super useful feature is the Lockout - Tagout (LOTO) enforcement. It has become really critical to safety and a particular way to enforce it is through software. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfBsAE8ydEo

Having a platform that helps your crew to do the exact things, at the correct times, step by step is also key to increase safety.

We talk in this episode about how our CNG or LNG stations must have an inner culture to submit requests and notify breakdowns immediately in an orderly fashion. This because we can acknowledge exactly and fix accordingly. Not just promote reporting, but increase visibility and proceed to prioritise whats really urgent and reduce downtime finally by simply changing the mindset.

Our industry is filled with requests that need to be solved immediately in order to not affect the sales. Doing all this with paper, retyping, is counter-productive. Compare that with mobilizing and modernizing, with pictures, descriptions, and notifications in real time. It’s all about streamlining communications and speeding up the response from notice to resolution, because the bottomline is that every minute counts.

A good CMMS must bridge the gap between the data and you to analyze and then the tools to create a workflow, to take actions when things happen.

We talk also about unmanned facilities and how Upkeep can be the tool to manage maintenance even in lights-out factories. The recent trends for software is to have very specialized software that generate different datasets, and those different service providers need to have the ability to send out and receive information thus being capable of being an integrated hub.

Upkeep achieves that with their Open API platform:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=700&v=V